Copyright Statement

Abstract

At the farewell drinks at the end of my time working for the Australian
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, one of my colleagues reminded me
how I arrived at the office (Australian Mission to the UN in Geneva) late in the
day and with a big grin said: 'We made fantastic progress after four hours of
negotiations today: we removed two commas and added a square bracket!' It is
indeed easy to be cynical about the UN treaty-making system. The current
snail's pace in developing an effective global climate agreement only fuels this
cynicism. But global negotiations on a climate treaty remain extremely
important. This importance is linked to justice: an effective climate treaty is
a necessary condition for not unfairly transferring the costs of climate change
onto future generations. Climate change will seriously impact current generations
within their lifetime, with increased mortality from extreme weather
events and tropical diseases (IPCC 2014b). But the most severe impacts will be
felt by unborn generations, and these future generations will face risks of
irreversible harm to the global ecological system and climate. The IPCC 5th
Assessment Report highlights some of these risks including the significant risk
of meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet (IPCC 2014a).

This chapter aims to explore the linkages between justice and political
feasibility in considering what type of instrument should emerge from the
Durban negotiation process for a new global climate agreement and the
related issue of whether mitigation commitments should be binding or not.
Put differently, what 'ideal' form should a climate agreement take in the 'nonideal'
context of states being reluctant to take the required action in deeply
cutting their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? The terms 'justice' and 'fairness'
are used interchangeably in this chapter (see Section 6.2). The term
'feasibility' is used to denote what is possible and probable given a number
of constraints including countries' current negotiating positions and the
structure of the treaty-making process (see Gilabert and Lawford-Smith
2012: 809).